Fragmented Mirror Works by Anish Kapoor – Art Review

By Jesse Bowling

Kapoor’s mirror works are large sculptures by artist Anish Kapoor. They are large, concave stainless steel discs made from many shapes.

Fragmented mirrors reflect the institution literally upside down. As you approach the mirror it flips reality back to normal. This is to do with optics and focal points. The focal points change with the light reflecting as your eye comes closer, you narrow your focal point hence the image becomes clearer for your perception to obtain a “normal” reflection. The mirror, in Foucauldian theory, is a utopia and a heterotopia; in that the mirror reflects reality in its present form, through a physical object, but the reflection is not physical. A mirror is placeless because as we see ourselves “over there” we are not actually there. It is merely mimicking what is placed in front of its focal point.

Quote from Different Spaces, Foucault, 1984:

“In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”

The work also pixels its reflected reality by joining many shapes like the hexagon. This makes up an interesting reflection that is made up of individual reflections to create a whole.

An “ironic” twist on Kapoors work is the intervention of technology by gallery visitors. There are many images online when googling his work. A lot of people are taking selfies in these mirror works. The interesting thing here is the use of the selfie that is then placed on social media of them selves in an art work. There is a continuum here of what I explained earlier and what Foucault writes about how one’s self is set in a mirror in an alternate reality. This “alternate reality” is experienced twice, one through the mirror, second through the uploading of the image on to a heterotopic space, the Internet. Does the selfie undermine the power of the mirror in this instance? Or does it engage with it on a different more supportive level, that re-enforces the mirrors narrative? Some thing interesting to think about!